''Over the years I have encountered the hazards and rewards that await the historian of immigration'': George Malcolm Stephenson and the Swedish-American Community

"Over the years I have encountered the
hazards and rewards that await the historian
of immigration":
George Malcolm Stephenson and the
Swedish-American Community*
RUDOLPH J. VECOLI
George Malcolm Stephenson was one of a small group of pro­fessional
historians (Marcus Lee Hansen, Theodore C . Blegen,
and Carl Wittke were the others) who in the years immedi­ately
after World War I rescued immigration history from the filio¬
pietists and established it as a legitimate field of historical study.
These were sons of parents who had participated in the great nine­teenth-
century emigration from northern Europe. Second-generation
Americans, raised in immigrant families but trained in seminars at
Harvard and other universities, they were willy-nilly enmeshed in the
clash between differing conceptions of the nature and purpose of
history.1
In response to an exclusionary Anglo-American narrative, immi­grant
historical societies were intent upon defining a virtuous and
patriotic past, one that would gain them esteem and acceptance.2
Along came their sons, the professors, intent on being objective, or,
in Stephenson's words, applying "the historian's standards of dispas­sionate
exposition," dealing evenhandedly with the negative as well
RUDOLPH J. VECOLI is professor of history and director of the Immigration History
Research Center at the University of M i n n e s o t a . H e has written extensively about
A m e r i c a n immigration and ethnic history. His most recent publication is "The Italian
Immigrant Press and the Construction of Social Reality, 1950-1920," in Print Cul­ture
in a Diverse America, edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A . Wiegand
( 1 9 9 8 ) .
as the positive aspects of the ethnic group's history.3
Such conflicts between the professional and the ethnic, between
versions of history (and the resulting tug of loyalties), have been and
continue to be a source of vexation for those of us who are both
scholars and ethnics. This essay explores that relationship through
the career of Stephenson, the immigration historian, whose devotion
to his craft resulted in dissension with, and finally estrangement from,
his Swedish-American community.
George Malcom Stephenson was born 30 December 1883 in
Swedesburg, Iowa, the youngest of ten children of Olaus Steffanson
and Maja Lena Jonsdotter, both of whom had emigrated from Swe­den
at a young age with their families. George's paternal grandfather,
Steffan Steffanson, who had been a crofter in Sodra V i in northeast­ern
Smaland, settled in New Sweden, Iowa, in 1849. In the mid-
1850s, father and mother and seven children died in a cholera epi­demic;
only Olaus and two sisters survived. Olaus farmed successfully
in Swedesburg until he moved to Rock Island in 1894 and became a
merchant.4 George recalled his childhood on the farm with fondness:
"Until I attained the age of ten, I had the good fortune to enjoy the
peace, security and prosperity of Henry County, Iowa." He remem­bered
the Stephenson home as "a sort of clearing house for immi­grants
who came to the community," where newcomers were shel­tered
until they found employment as "hired hands" on the farms of
Yankee neighbors. In Rock Island, the guests were "preachers and
professors," and George remembered listening to conversations about
church problems at the dinner table.5
The only indication that George's boyhood was less than idyllic
was his observation late in life that, thankfully, the Swedish language
was now "cultivated by the few who have the inclination and abil­ity,"
and not inflicted "as an instrument of torture [on] boys who were
compelled to stay indoors to memorize the Catechism, while neigh­bor
boys were playing baseball or coasting, or to attend 'Swede
school' during the summer vacation, when other boys were wading in
the brook or catching fish."6
Since his parents were faithful members of the Augustana Synod
Swedish Lutheran Church, George recalled, "I attended a Swedish
Sunday school, and under compulsion listened to long Swedish ser-
131
mons; and also watched my father nod during the sermon—not in
approval of what the preacher said, however."7
O. Fritiof Ander, perhaps Stephenson's closest confidant, com­mented
that George's pietistic upbringing "left a deep impression
upon him [and his scholarship] from which he never succeeded in
freeing himself."8 Indeed, the seeds of Stephenson's rebelliousness
against an oppressive religious and ethnic environment appear to
have been planted early in his youth.
That George should attend Augustana College was a foregone
conclusion; his father served on the college's board of directors from
1885 until his death. First enrolled in 1901, George was not awarded
the A . B . degree until 1910, because he became involved in a dispute
with the faculty, an early expression of his combative and stubborn
personality.9 Stephenson has left this compelling description of stu­dent
life at Augustana College:
The campus population was s u i generis to Swedish America;
it was recruited from rural and urban communities from the
Atlantic to the Rockies. Farmers, miners, sailors, and com­mon
laborers predominated. These young men burned mid­night
oil over Caesar's G a l l i c W a r and Xenophon's A n a b a s i s in
order to prepare themselves for the high calling of minister­ing
to their fellow countrymen who had migrated to the
"Land of Canaan." Literary societies, debating clubs, oratori­cal
contests, missionary societies, prayer meetings, the Handel
Oratorio Society, the band, and the orchestra took prece­dence
over non-existent dances, bridge parties, fraternities,
week-end parties, and football games. The citizens of Rock
Island spoke disdainfully of the "Swede College," a name
that described it accurately, although the students to a man,
perhaps, resented the characterization.10
After leaving Augustana, Stephenson secured a bachelor's degree
from the University of Chicago and taught several years at the Min­nesota
College in Minneapolis before heading east to study history at
Harvard with Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner had a profound and
lasting influence on Stephenson, as he did upon an entire generation
132
of American historians. In addition to his path-breaking frontier the­sis
of 1893, Turner helped define the new field of social history by
calling for the study of ordinary people and everyday life." Although
Turner encouraged his students, including Marcus Lee Hansen, to
study immigration history, he did not do so in Stephenson's case.
Years later he wrote that Turner "didn't know much about the sub­ject.
I suggested the possibility of writing on the Scandinavians for
my doctoral dissertation, but [Turner] vetoed it because he doubted
there was sufficient material."1 2 Stephenson then wrote a dissertation
which was published as The P o l i t i c a l H i s t o r y of the P u b l i c L a n d s f r om
1 8 4 0 t o 1 8 6 2 : F r o m P r e e m p t i o n to Homestead (1917). Since it was
concerned with the settlement of the West "by pioneers from every
state in the Union and from countries of Europe," the study brought
him back to the topic of immigration.13
Stephenson conceived of his life's work as "writing my own auto­biography
in the form of the history of immigration and of biogra­phies
of Swedish immigrants." The inspiration of his scholarship was
drawn from "the memories of boyhood and youth spent in a Swed­ish-
American community and on the campus of a Swedish-Ameri­can
college . . . [which] took on a new meaning and significance as a
graduate student and as a member of the faculty of one of the largest
Scandinavian universities in the world."14
The latter was a reference to the University of Minnesota, where
Stephenson taught from 1914 until his retirement in 1952 with only
a few brief interruptions. Stephenson's course in American immigra­tion
history was perhaps the first to be offered in any university
curriculum in the country. The nature of the course might be ascer­tained
from his A History of A m e r i c a n I m m i g r a t i o n : 1 8 2 0 - 1 9 2 4 (1926).15
Stephenson noted that the enactment of immigration-restrictive leg­islation
two years earlier "closed a momentous chapter in American
and European history."1 6 A n early and praiseworthy effort at synthe­sis,
the volume was limited by the paucity of research as well as the
biases characteristic of the time. However, Stephenson's injunction to
students of "the causes and motives which underlie the exodus from
Europe to America" to pursue their researches "to the cottages of the
peasants and to the humble dwellings of the laborers in the factory
and on the farm" still guides our studies today.17
133
Contemporaneously at work in his special field, Stephenson pub­lished,
among other articles, "The Background of the Beginnings of
Swedish Immigration," in the A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l Review (1926). But
it was, as he put it, the generosity of the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation and the University of Minnesota that enabled him to
devote a full year (1927-28) to researching the Swedish emigration
in Sweden.1 8 While he luxuriated in the bountiful sources of the
Royal Library in Stockholm, he extended his quest to provincial and
parish archives. Following his own injunction, he visited cousins and
near-cousins "on their farms on the stony soil of Smaland." Stephenson
remembered those "eight or ten calls per day, with at least that many
cups of coffee . . . [as] a delightful exercise in historical research."19
He returned to Minnesota with hundreds of "America letters," grist
for many of his writings, including "When America Was the Land of
Canaan," M i n n e s o t a H i s t o r y (1929), which Stephenson himself re­garded
as "the best thing I have written."20
Perhaps because of his youthful experiences, Stephenson was
drawn to the study of the religious life and institutions of the Swedish
immigrants. A n early work in this vein was The F o u n d i n g o f t h e
A u g u s t a n a S y n o d 1 8 5 0 - 1 8 6 0 (1927). As Ander observed, the rich
holdings of Swedish-American religious literature of the Royal L i ­brary
nourished Stephenson's interests. In fact, he suggests that
Stephenson overlooked other important sources and thus other as­pects
of the Swedish immigrant experience, because he buried him­self
so completely, even compulsively, in this literature.21 The fruit of
this research was to be Stephenson's magnum opus, The R e l i g i o us
Aspects of S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n (1932). It was this work that embroiled
him in a long-running controversy with the conservative clerical
establishment of the Augustana Synod and culminated in his alien­ation
from the Swedish-American community.
Even prior to the appearance of R e l i g i o u s Aspects, Stephenson had
antagonized some of the clergy with his articles. In 1930 he confided
to a correspondent, "Some of the pastors are already after my scalp as
a 'heretic,' but that isn't causing me a single, sleepless night. I prefer
to be the instrument of the liberal and progressive element. . . . I ask
no favors of those self-styled Paul Reveres, who cloak their bad
humors under the guise of a severe orthodoxy."2 2 Stephenson had
134
anticipated a negative response to Religious Aspects; on the eve of its
publication he wrote to John Barnhart:
I have gotten something off my chest. . . . I fear much that
this book will not enhance my popularity with the church
folk in Swedish America. They have been fed on eulogies so
long that they have no appetite for anything else. Well, the
dose I have concocted will not be palatable. You know 1
never did have much time for these professional religious
guys. . . . Blegen read a few pages of my manuscript and
predicts that hell will pop when it falls into the hands of the
clergy.2 3
These anticipations proved to be well founded; one professor at
the Augustana Theological Seminary was reported to have become
"violently nauseated after scanning a few chapters."2 4 The book sold
very poorly; it was apparently boycotted by the more orthodox breth­ren.
Writing in 1945, in reply to a letter praising the work, Stephenson
commented, "You are one of the few Americans of Swedish blood
who has read the book. The Augustana Book Concern wouldn't
even carry it in stock; and the bigwigs in the Augustana Synod have
scarcely deigned to notice it. This was just what I expected, so I was
not in the least disappointed."25
Almost a quarter century following its publication, Stephenson
commented sarcastically upon a letter from an Augustana Theologi­cal
Seminary professor who had written to express appreciation of
R e l i g i o u s Aspects: "It was gratifying to know the historian attached to
the seminary faculty and a handful of brethren in the faith had
discovered the existence of my book—even if it did take twenty-five
years to work the miracle."2 6 Such bitter comments written decades
after the fact belied the high hopes that Stephenson had had for the
book; at the moment of publication, he confessed: "It would please
me if the book would inspire interest on the part of the children and
grandchildren of Swedish immigrants in their heritage, something
that is woefully lacking. It isn't necessary to eulogize the people of
Swedish blood," he added. "The facts speak for themselves."27
As is true of all historians, Stephenson did more than allow the
135
facts to speak for themselves. O. Fritiof Ander judged him "harsh" in
his assessment of the Augustana Synod, adding that Stephenson had
allowed himself to be overpowered by his sources and his "personal
interests."28 He speculated that Stephenson, in his zeal to be thor­oughly
objective, had in fact become overly critical, unable to sepa­rate
his unpleasant memories of a strict Lutheran upbringing from
historical reality. In his preface to the volume, Stephenson admitted
that, "like all historians, [I have] been affected by . . . subconscious
but formative memories."2 9 Although accused by his critics of being
irreligious and an agnostic, those who knew him well described
Stephenson as being "deeply pious."30
Stephenson found a more congenial subject for what was to be
his last major work dealing with Swedish Americans. Written during
the economic depression and New Deal of the 1930s, his biography
of John Lind (1935), first Swedish-born congressman and governor of
Minnesota, struck the theme of progressive politics with which
Stephenson strongly identified. In a letter to Guy Stanton Ford, he
wrote: "You know I am a Wilson Democrat."3 1 In this respect also,
Stephenson radically departed from his background. "In hundreds of
Swedish communities," he observed, "a Democrat was a curiosity, a
strange being, who, if not demented, surely concealed a cloven hoof."32
Stephenson reminisced in 1941:
As a youngster not yet in his teens, brought up in a Swedish
Lutheran home—for Swedish Lutheranism and Republican­ism
were identical twins—I was horrified to hear my Father,
who had stored in his memory the accumulated sins of the
Democratic Party from James Buchanan to Grover Cleve­land,
lament that in remote Minnesota there was a Swede
named John Lind who had not only deserted the Republican
party but had publicly declared himself a "political orphan."
At the time I was probably too naive to comprehend fully
the enormity of Lind's offense, namely, that of running for the
governorship of Minnesota with the indorsement of Popu­lists,
Democrats, and Silver Republicans; but I did detect the
peculiar quality of my Father's voice when he referred to
John Lind as a "Popocrat."33
136
The fact that George's father had denounced Lind as a Popocrat may
have made him more appealing to his future biographer.
The choice of Lind as a subject resonated with Stephenson's
autobiography. Both were reared in repressive childhood environ­ments,
against which they rebelled, becoming religious and political
heretics. Both "dearly loved a scrap and would go out of [their] way
to invite controversy," and both believed that their enemies were
intent on persecuting them for their recalcitrance.3 4 In a letter,
Stephenson wrote that "Lind was an interesting and able man, but
was never appreciated by the Swedes in Minnesota or elsewhere."35
One senses that in this respect as well Stephenson identified with
Lind. Moreover, as James Iverne Dowie, friend and student of
Stephenson, commented, both had "the touch of compassion for
unfortunates in society."36
Stephenson's estrangement from the Swedish-American commu­nity
extended beyond religious and political disagreements; he dis­tanced
himself socially as well. During the 1920s he had been ac­tively
involved with the Swedish Historical Society of America (es­tablished
in 1905), serving as managing editor of its publications
from 1921 to 1929 and contributing many pieces to the Yearbook of
the S w e d i s h H i s t o r i c a l Society of A m e r i c a and the S w e d i s h A m e r i c a n H i s ­t
o r i c a l B u l l e t i n . As late as 1927, he wrote that, although the yearbook
of the historical society was not what it ought to be, "I believe that
there are some signs of improvement from year to year which give
reason to hope that some day it will be a credit to the Society and to
the pioneers and their descendants."37 In a 1929 issue of the B u l l e t i n,
Stephenson cited the Society's financial crisis and appealed to "pros­perous
Swedish Americans . . . for substantial contributions that will
be a credit to the Swedish people."3 8 By the 1930s, however, he had
concluded that "the Swedes are not interested in their history. . . .
The first of this month the Swedish Historical Society staged the
annual banquet, but I didn't attend. . . . So far as I know, the society
is inactive."3 9 In retrospect, Stephenson asserted that the society
"had died because it was strangled at birth. . . . It might have been
saved if there had been one or two men in the organization who
knew what a historical society is supposed to be."4 0 In the most
137
invidious comparison a Swedish American could make, Stephenson
complained that, while the Norwegian American Historical Associa­tion
was supported by wealthy Norwegians, the Swedish society got
checks for two dollars.
Time did not heal these wounds. In a letter of 1941 to Margaret
Anderson, managing editor of C o m m o n G r o u n d , with whom he had a
long and revealing correspondence, Stephenson declared his total
disillusionment with the Swedish-American community: "There are
too many competing institutes and societies, where the well-known
Swedish jealousy gets in its work. I am forever through with the
Swedes in the U S A . I have severed my connection with the Swedish
Society and the Turnblad crowd. Augustana College is the only
creditable institution supported by the Swedes. . . . The other activi­ties
are more or less futile."41
Writing to Adolph Benson in 1944, Stephenson asserted, "I have
been occupied with other things to the extent that I have neglected
in recent years Swedish-American history."4 2 Nils William Olsson
recently recounted that when he consulted Stephenson in the late-
1940s on whether funds should be expended on publishing a journal
on Swedish-American history or on a banquet, "Honest George"
replied: "We tried that and it failed. Enjoy yourselves."43 When Paul
Varg wrote in 1950 to solicit manuscripts for the newly established
S w e d i s h Pioneer Historical Q u a r t e r l y , Stephenson replied that he could
be of no help, since he had completely deserted the field of immigra­tion,
but he added with a querulous note, "I have not seen the first
issue of The S w e d i s h Pioneer. I did not know that any such plans were
afoot. Where is it published? Who is back of it?"44
A reconciliation of sorts took place when Stephenson addressed
the annual meeting of the Swedish Pioneer Historical Society in
Chicago on 7 January 1956. In the lecture, entitled "Rip Van Winkle
in Sweden," he reported on his visit to the Old Country after an
absence of twenty-six years. Stephenson, however, could not resist
this opportunity to even some old scores. He devoted a good deal of
his talk to lambasting the Swedish-American religious establishment,
contrasting the "democracy, pietism, and puritanism of religion in the
United States" with the symbolism, legalism, and clericalism of the
state church in Sweden. The Swedish immigrants, he added, "learned
138
that there was room in the United States for Christians who ques­tioned
the validity of ecclesiastical regulations and legislative enact­ments
which denied the right of a man to teach publicly in the
church and to administer the sacraments, unless he was ordained
according to prescribed forms and ceremonies and set apart in the
clerical estate."45
While the early Swedish-American churches were at their incep­tion
lay missionary movements ("religious experiment stations"), free
of ritualism and liturgical formalism, the Augustana Synod clergy in
time assumed "the artificial sanctity which [had] converted the cleri­cal
estate in Sweden into an instrument of ambition and tyranny."
A n "extraordinary trend toward high-churchism, including gowns,
vestments, and symbolism," followed.46
Stephenson also made pointed remarks, which were certainly not
lost on his audience, about "the hazards and rewards that await the
historian of immigration":
It is not an easy task to ferret out the events of the past; and
it is even more difficult to interpret the facts. Some readers
load on the shoulders of the historian the responsibility for
what has happened. I have long since ceased to take any
responsibility for my ancestors; and I am looking forward to
the time when cheating in history will be as disreputable as
cheating at cards. Leaders of certain immigrant groups have
been extremely sensitive; and some historians have sought to
appease them by distorting facts. In the field of church his­tory
an incredible amount of falsity has accumulated in de­nominational
histories. Some authors have distorted the truth
to the extent that one is tempted to believe with them it is,
"My own church, right or wrong."47
O. Fritiof Ander, who had written his dissertation on the
Augustana church leader T. N . Hasselquist and subsequently a book,
The A m e r i c a n O r i g i n of t h e A u g u s t a n a S y n o d (1942), from a more
positive perspective than Stephenson, perhaps felt himself to be the
target of some of these barbs. This may explain Ander's statement
that Stephenson, "my very close friend . . . could deeply hurt pre-
139
cisely those persons whom he liked."48
Clearly, Stephenson felt unloved and unappreciated by his own
people; there is more than a hint that he thought of himself as "a
prophet without honor in his own country," a phrase that appears
repeatedly in his writings. It is true that he received greater recogni­tion
by Sweden than by Swedish America, being decorated Knight of
the Royal Order of the North Star by the King of Sweden in 1937
and being honored with a Ph.D. h o n o r i s causa by Uppsala University
in 1938.4 9 Stephenson attributed this neglect to the rapidity with
which Swedish immigrants had assimilated. By 1956, he could de­clare
approvingly that the preservation of the Swedish language and
culture in the United States was "a closed chapter."50
If Swedish Americans paid h im little attention, neither did
Stephenson receive the recognition that he thought was his due from
fellow historians. A t a session of the American Historical Association
in December 1938 on "Scandinavian Contributions to American
Life," which was a memorial to Laurence M . Larson and Marcus Lee
Hansen, both of whom had died that year, Stephenson addressed the
needs and opportunities for research in immigration history. Com­menting
on the field as a whole, he noted that "the sum total of
books and articles that have appeared [on the subject] does not give
cause for unrestrained congratulations." Nor had the findings of im­migration
historians "seeped through the covers of textbooks in
American history." Expressing what sounded like personal resent­ment,
he complained that if a historian wrote a ponderous book on
the difference between c o n s i l i u m and c o n c i l i u m in medieval history,
he was sure to have a major review in the A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l R e v i e w,
while if he wrote a monograph on "the greatest V o l k e r w a n d e r u n g in
history," he might get a paragraph in "Notes and Comments."51
In private letters, Stephenson lamented that so few of the "big
shots" of the association had attended the session, since they were
the ones who needed to be informed about the importance and
neglect of immigration history.5 2 Writing to fellow historian Carl
Wittke, he commiserated, "Those of us who have dabbled in the
history of immigration have received little or no recognition from the
historical profession, as you well know; but some day—after you and
I have passed on—historians will probably be grateful for our pio-
140
neering."5 3 By 1948, he could respond to an inquiry regarding immi­gration
history that his research had shifted to other subjects.54 "Years
ago," he added, "I had high hopes for the future of the History of
Immigration. I thought an increasing number of historians would
become interested, but things didn't work out. In recent years a
number of books have been published, but, with few exceptions,
they are of poor quality. Possibly the language problem scares people
away." The following year Stephenson confided to Ander that, since
the subject had grown stale for him, he was "tickled to be relieved of
the teaching of immigration history. Very little of value has been
published in the field since we began our work and some of the most
recent volumes actually stink."55
Stephenson's last book, The P u r i t a n H e r i t a g e (1952), a study in
American religious history, did not deal directly with immigration,
although Ander read it in an autobiographical sense as a "religious
confession."5 6 The work was a vigorous apologia for Puritanism through
which Stephenson expressed his disillusionment with post-World War
II society:
Twentieth-century America appears to have lost the Puritan
heritage. A generation whose "literature" is more akin to the
licentiousness of the press which ridiculed the Puritans in
England, whose "movies" revel in the filth of the muckrake,
whose radio and television programs serve a fare of vulgarity,
and whose mechanism has degraded the superior man and
has enhanced the power of the inferior man, is incapable of
understanding a religious movement whose appeal is to the
"remnant," to those who are conscious of the brevity of hu­man
life and recognize the spiritual life as the one great
reality.5 7
For Stephenson, the Depression and World War II constituted a
"catastrophe that shattered the dream of making a heaven on earth."
Stephenson's progressive vision, which permeated his writings on im­migration
history, had collided with the ugly realities of the twentieth
century.5 8
Stephenson died on 11 October 1958, at age seventy-four. Two
141
years later, at the Eleventh International Congress of Historical Sci­ences
meeting in Stockholm, Frank Thistlethwaite presented a semi­nal
paper, "Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century."5 9 This essay, comparable in its influence to Turner's
frontier thesis, was to be a catalyst, inspiring and informing a whole
generation of migration historians, not only in the United States, but
in other countries as well. The "Sweden and America after 1860"
project at the University of Uppsala was directly stimulated by
Thistlethwaite's provocative reinterpretation of the Atlantic migra­tion.
Under the direction of Sten Carlsson, the project produced
over twenty-five dissertations and other studies of the Swedish emi­gration,
culminating in the volume, edited by Harald Runblom and
Hans Norman, From Sweden to America (1976). Since the death of
Professor Carlsson, the field of Swedish emigration studies has contin­ued
to flourish, thanks to the scholarly work of Runblom and other
alumni of the Uppsala project.60
Similarly, from the 1960s immigration history in the United States
has grown and prospered beyond Stephenson's wildest dreams. The
formation of the Immigration History Society (recently renamed the
Immigration and Ethnic History Society) in 1965 and the founding
of its journal, J o u r n a l of A m e r i c a n E t h n i c H i s t o r y , in 1981 marked the
rapid growth of the field. Most dramatic has been the explosive
production of dissertations, monographs, and articles dealing with
multiple aspects of human migration. Although other factors played
a role, Thistlethwaite's heuristic thesis clearly provided a major impe­tus
to the coming of age of migration history.61
The connection between Stephenson and Thistlethwaite was nei­ther
coincidental nor casual. In the late 1930s, as a Commonwealth
Fund Fellow, a young Frank Thistlethwaite studied at the University
of Minnesota with Stephenson, to whom he later attributed his abid­ing
interest in migration history. A t the international conference " A
Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930," held at the University
of Minnesota in 1986, at which Professor Thistlethwaite was the
keynote speaker, Stephenson's role as a forebear of the gathering was
appropriately acknowledged.62
George Malcolm Stephenson made important contributions to
Swedish-American history and to American history in general. He
142
was in fact slighted by his contemporaries, both Swedish Americans
and fellow historians. Stephenson, however, was buoyed by the belief
that one day his work would receive its proper recognition. To Louis
Adamic, the Slovene immigrant who became an influential writer on
American pluralism, Stephenson wrote in 1939: " A few of us [immi­gration]
historians have cried in the wilderness; orthodox historians
have not heard our cries. Future historians, however, will pay more
attention to what we have written, and, I suppose, that ought to be
consolation and reward enough."63
* A v e r s i o n of this a r t i c l e appeared in Migration och mångfald. Essäer om
kulturkontakt och minoritetsfrågor, D a g B l a n c k and Per Jegebäck
( U p p s a l a : C e n t e r f o r M u l t i e t h n i c Research, 1999).
ENDNOTES
1. Edward N . Saveth, A m e r i c a n Historians and E u r o p e a n Immigrants 1875-
1925 (New York, 1948); Edward Mims, A m e r i c a n History and Immigration
(Bronxville, N.Y., 1950); Rudolph J. Vecoli, "European Americans: From Immi­grants
to Ethnics," in The Reinterpretation of A m e r i c a n History and C u l t u r e , ed.
William H . Cartwright and Richard L. Watson (Washington, D.C., 1973), 81-
112.
2. John J. Appel, Immigrant Historical Societies in The United States, 1880-
1 9 5 0 (New York, 1980); Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Ethnic Historical Societies: From
Filiopiety to Scholarship" (unpublished, 1967).
3. George M. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Min­neapolis,
1932), v. As Robert S. Salisbury points out, although Stephenson
abhorred chauvinistic filiopiety and strove for objectivity, he "was not always
immune to sentimentality when writing about his ancestors." A n assimilationist,
he emphasized the positive qualities of Swedish immigrants and the ease and
rapidity with which they Americanized. "Swedish-American Historiography and
the Question of Americanization," The Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly (April
1983): 121-222. See also George M. Stephenson, "Swedes Leave Their Mark on
U.S. Way of Life," Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 27 June 1948, "Swedish Centen­nial
Issue." Clipping, in George M. Stephenson Papers, University of Minnesota
Archives. Hereafter cited: GMS Papers.
Stephenson was generally an assimilationist, believing that "problems per­taining
to European immigrants have been and are ephemeral, submissive to the
healing processes of time." However, in one of the few references in his writings
to non-European immigrants, he commented, "Our country has more permanent
143
problems of racial minorities: Negroes in the South; Orientals on the Pacific
Coast; Mexicans in the Southwest; and native Indians on reservations . . . no
tailor, barber, schoolteacher, or climate can change the color of the American
Indian, the Mexican Indian, the Oriental and the Negro." Nowhere, to my knowl­edge,
did Stephenson address the consequences of such racial differences for
American democracy. George M. Stephenson, "The History of Immigration"
(manuscript with notation: "December, 1938—at A H A meeting in Chicago"),
GMS Papers.
4. George M . Stephenson, " A n America Letter of 1849," Yearbook Swedish
Historical Society of A m e r i c a 11 (1926): 84-102. The letter written by Stephenson's
grandfather, Steffan Steffanson, is prefaced with a brief family history. See also
Allan Kastrup, The Swedish Heritage in A m e r i c a (St. Paul, 1975), 177. Kermit
Westerberg, then archivist of the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Cen­ter,
provided data drawn from church records regarding the Steffanson family.
For an obituary of George's father, Oliver Stephenson, The Rock Island U n i o n , 17
July 1898, clipping, GMS Papers.
5. "Autobiographical Sketch," 13 April 1941, is the source of these quotes.
Stephenson wrote this for a volume on Minnesota authors, but decided for
reasons unknown not to have it published. George M. Stephenson to Carmen
Richards, 20 June 1945, GMS Papers. George M. Stephenson to G. Bernhard
Anderson, 30 June 1948, GMS Papers.
6. George M . Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle in Sweden," The Swedish Pio¬
neer Historical Quarterly 7 (April 1956): 52.
7. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 59.
8. O. Fritiof Ander, "Immigrationshistoriens Utveckling i Amerika," Särtryck
ur Historisk Tidskrift 1961, 291-92. I am indebted to Victoria Oliver for transla­tions
from this article.
9. Augustana College records provided by Kermit Westerberg. Although he
was to graduate from Augustana in 1904, Stephenson was informed that he was
one credit short (a course on Christianity), whereupon he told the college au­thorities
that he would graduate from a first-class institution, the University of
Chicago. Interview with George M. Stephenson II, 12 April 1991; comment of
Conrad Bergendoff following my presentation of this paper at Augustana Col­lege,
April 1990.
10. "Autobiographical Sketch."
11. George M . Stephenson to Naboth Hedin, 22 January 1938, GMS Pa­pers,
provides a curriculum vitae. Although Turner's perspective on American
history permeated Stephenson's writings, he also explicitly acknowledged this
influence: "[Turner's] tutelage and my own research revealed to me the vital
relationship between the opening of a continent to settlement and the great
exodus from the countries of northern and western Europe." "Autobiographical
144
Sketch." His son recalled that "he was always referring to Turner" as his model.
Interview with George M. Stephenson II. As a progressive historian, Stephenson
also admired the Beards: "The verdict of history is worth playing for—as long as
there are historians like Charles and Mary Beard." James Iverne Dowie, "The
Two Worlds of George Malcolm Stephenson, 1883-1958," 7. This (to my knowl­edge)
unpublished paper, by a student and friend of Stephenson, was provided
by Dag Blanck, Director, Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center.
12. George M . Stephenson to Margaret Anderson, 3 December 1941, GMS
Papers. He commented, perhaps with a touch of pique, "Marcus Hansen prob­ably
got his inspiration to work on immigration from Turner," adding, "Hansen
is much overrated."
13. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 52.
14. "Autobiographical Sketch."
15. George M . Stephenson to Howard K. Beale, 17 November 1948, GMS
Papers. "I believe that my course [History of Immigration] was the first to be
offered at the collegiate level—that is, in a department of history.... My little
book, A History of A m e r i c a n Immigration . . . will suggest the contents of the
course. . . . I would be very sorry, however, if you got the impression that my
course was as limited as my book, which was a pioneer effort intended to be
merely an introduction."
16. George M. Stephenson, A History of A m e r i c a n Immigration: 1820-1924
(Boston, 1926), 3.
17. Stephenson, History of American Immigration, 7.
18. George M . Stephenson to G . N . Swan, 11 April 1927, GMS Papers. He
added, "My aim is to write a history of the Swedish immigration, but when I
ponder the vast amount of research that must precede this undertaking, I am
doubtful if it can be done within the present generation."
19. "Autobiographical Sketch." Stephenson elsewhere described this re­search
as a "form of cousin-hunting in the red cottages along the rocky, pine-clad
hills of Sweden." Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 27 June 1948, "Swedish Centen­nial
Issue." Clipping, GMS Papers.
20. George M . Stephenson to Louis Adamic, 14 June 1939, GMS Papers.
21. Ander, 291-92. In the Royal Library, "Stephenson found a paradise [of
documentation] for those interests which were rooted in his youth."
22. George M . Stephenson to "Dear Duffy," 24 December 1930, GMS Pa­pers.
Of his articles in the Lutheran C o m p a n i o n attacking the Augustana Synod
leadership, Stephenson wrote, "[They] are so brutally frank and truthful that
they will not enhance my popularity in the synod, if I have any left." As a
member of the board of directors of Augustana College, he also was a severe
critic of the conservative clerical establishment. Stephenson conveyed the fla­vor
of this conflict in a letter to Ander: "The board . . . is alive to the necessity
145
of inaugurating a new regime, although it may take a little time before some of
us Bolsheviks on the board will be satisfied." 27 February 1931.
23. George M . Stephenson to John D. Barnhart, 25 March 1931, GMS
Papers. The reference is to Theodore Blegen, friend, colleague, and pioneer
historian of the Norwegian immigration to the United States.
24. George M. Stephenson to Clifford Nelson, 14 September 1956, GMS
Papers.
25. George M . Stephenson to G . Bernhard Anderson, GMS Papers.
26. George M . Stephenson to Clifford Nelson, 14 September 1956, GMS
Papers.
27. George M . Stephenson to E. Hamlin, 10 June 1932, GMS Papers.
28. Ander, 291-92. Ander continued, "Stephenson strove to be objective
and to overcome his own prejudices. While he distanced himself from the
Augustana Synod, it proved to be impossible for him to separate his personal
impressions from historical reality. His deep religious interest sharpened his cri­tique."
29. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration, v. But, he added,
he had "clung as best he could to the historian's standard of dispassionate expo­sition."
In a letter, Stephenson wrote, "I do not flatter myself that I have always
succeeded in attaining impartiality and objectivity. But I have at least made an
honest effort." The book, he noted, had not been well received by "certain
individuals in the Augustana Synod, of which I am a member.... Possibly there
is still truth in the scriptural passage about a prophet without honor in his own
country." George M . Stephenson to E. Hamlin, 10 June 1932, GMS Papers.
30. Stephenson was subject to slanders that he was not a member of the
Lutheran Church, that he did not send his children to Sunday school, and even
that he was a heretic. O. Fritiof Ander to George M . Stephenson, 9 March 1931;
George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 27 March 1931, GMS Papers. Conrad
Bergendoff, a friend and himself an historian of the Augustana Synod, remem­bered
Stephenson as "deeply pious." Comment. Also interview with George M .
Stephenson II, 12 April 1991; and Dowie, 11,15. Dowie observed: "Because he
eschewed religious orthodoxy to the point of finally disassociating himself from
the church of his childhood, Stephenson was sometimes charged with holding
irreligious, not to say agnostic, views." But he confirms "the deep piety of
Stephenson."
31. George M. Stephenson to Guy Stanton Ford, 21 December 1956. Quoted
in Dowie, 13.
32. George M . Stephenson to S. G. Reinertsen, 26 January 1939. George M .
Stephenson, John Lind of Minnesota (Minneapolis, 1935), 119.
33. "Autobiographical Sketch," 1.
34. Ander, 292; Stephenson made this observation about Lind, but it could
146
equally have applied to him. John L i n d , 122.
35. George M . Stephenson to G . Bernhard Anderson, 30 June 1945, GMS
Papers. Ander comments: "They both had the same type of childhood environ­ment,
from which they later removed themselves for psychological reasons. They
became heretics in religious and political respects, and believed they must suffer
for this." 292. Dowie also comments upon the parallels in the lives of Lind and
Stephenson, 13-14.
36. Dowie, 14. Dowie noted that "Honest John" and "Honest George" were
both sympathetic to the temperance movement, and that Stephenson "reserved
some of his sharpest barbs for Swedish clergymen who sought their inspiration
more frequently from the jug than from the Holy Spirit."
37. George M . Stephenson to G . N . Swan, 11 April 1927, GMS Papers. To
S. W. Geiser, Stephenson wrote, "Almost every number of the Yearbook of the
Swedish Historical Society of A m e r i c a and the Swedish-American Historical Bulletin
since 1921 has something from my pen." 13 June 1930, GMS Papers.
38. Swedish A m e r i c a n Historical Bulletin 2 (February 1929).
39. George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 12 December 1934, GMS
Papers.
40. George M . Stephenson to Margaret Anderson, 3 December 1941, GMS
Papers. "It was killed," he asserted, "by jealousy and incompetence and inertia."
Byron Nordstrom, however, in his study of the Swedish Historical Society of
American, concluded that Stephenson himself, by his emphasis on objective
scholarship, contributed to its demise. Author's notes on a lecture by Nordstrom.
41. Stephenson to Anderson, 3 December 1941, GMS Papers. The refer­ence
to the "Turnblad crowd" alludes to the American Swedish Institute in
Minneapolis, which catered to upper-class Swedish Americans. Swan J. Turnblad
was a wealthy newspaper publisher who donated a magnificent mansion and his
fortune to the Institute.
42. George M . Stephenson to Adolph Benson, 23 October 1944, GMS
Papers.
43. Comment of Nils William Olsson following my presentation of this
paper at Augustana College, April 1990.
44. George M. Stephenson to Paul Varg, 17 September 1950, GMS Papers.
45. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 55.
46. Ibid., 56-58.
47. Ibid., 60.
48. Ander, 292.
49. Who Was Who in A m e r i c a , Vol. 3,1951-1962, 817. While the honorary
degree from Uppsala and the decoration from the King of Sweden are men­tioned
in this entry, Stephenson's LL.D. from Augustana College is not.
50. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 60.
147
51. Stephenson, "The History of Immigration," 3, 6. GMS Papers. A n ab­breviated
version was published in Minnesota Chats (a University of Minnesota
publication for the fathers and mothers of its students), 21 (17 January 1939), 4.
Stephenson also commented that "the history of immigration is as yet an illegiti­mate
field, just as the musicians tell us that the saxophone is an illegitimate
instrument."
52. George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 26 January 1939, GMS
Papers. Responding to S. G. Reinertsen's complaint (he was superintendent of
the Moorhead Public Schools) that immigration was neglected in grade and
high school history courses, Stephenson replied, "It does seem strange that a
movement of population that brought over thirty million Europeans to the
United States has been almost totally ignored in textbooks." George M .
Stephenson to S. G . Reinertsen, 26 January 1939, GMS Papers.
53. George M . Stephenson to Carl Wittke, 1 November 1939, GMS Pa­pers.
54. George M. Stephenson to Howard K. Beale, 17 November 1948, GMS
Papers.
55. George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 10 February 1949, GMS
Papers. Although Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted was not published until 1951,
Stephenson expressed his opinion of the book in a letter to Margaret Anderson:
"Wasn't the Pulitzer Prize for Handlin's The Uprooted God-awful? Ford asked me
to review the book, but I refused on the ground that the author didn't know
anything about the subject." 31 May 1952, GMS Papers. Guy Stanton Ford was
a professor of history, president of the University of Minnesota, and editor of the
A m e r i c a n Historical Review; from 1941 to 1953.
56. Ander, 92.
57. George M . Stephenson, The Puritan Heritage (New York, 1952), 267-69.
58. James Iverne Dowie, who had the opportunity to observe this transfor­mation,
wrote: "By the 1940s students sitting in Stephenson's classes became
cognizant of the collapse of the great dream. Their teacher, unacquainted with
the current fad among scholars who talk glibly about the great alienation in
American society, slipped neatly into the role of a Jeremiah." Dowie, 22.
59. Reprinted in Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne Sinke, eds., A Century of
E u r o p e a n Migrations, 1830-1930 (Urbana and Chicago: 1991), 17-49. The es­says
in the volume attest to the pervasive and widespread influence of the
Thistlethwaite thesis.
60. For a review of Swedish scholarship on international migration, see
Harald Runblom, "United States History in Swedish Research and Teaching," in
G u i d e to the Study of United States History outside the U . S . , 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 8 0 , ed. Lewis
Hanke (White Plains, N.Y., 1985), vol. III, 397-406. The report acknowledges
the influence of Thistlethwaite's essay upon the Uppsala project. See also Salisbury,
148
122-34.
61. Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Introduction," Century of E u r o p e a n Migrations, 1-
14; idem, "From The Uprooted to The Transplanted: The Writing of American
Immigration History, 1951-1989," in From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism, ed.
Valeria G. Lerda (Rome, 1991), 25-53.
62. Frank Thistlethwaite, "Postscript," in Vecoli and Sinke, A Century of
E u r o p e a n Migrations, 51. Of his studies at Minnesota, he told the conferees: "I
was attracted especially by the teaching of George Stephenson. ... This modest,
friendly and important scholar, more than anyone else, set my compass for me."
In a letter to the author, 5 August 1994, Thistlethwaite recalled: "[Stephenson's]
lectures were of the greatest interest and relevance to me in my novel Minnesota
context. [He was] a kindly, mild mannered man with a moustache, at the time
rather unusual."
63. George M . Stephenson to Louis Adamic, 14 June 1939, GMS Papers.
149

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"Over the years I have encountered the
hazards and rewards that await the historian
of immigration":
George Malcolm Stephenson and the
Swedish-American Community*
RUDOLPH J. VECOLI
George Malcolm Stephenson was one of a small group of pro­fessional
historians (Marcus Lee Hansen, Theodore C . Blegen,
and Carl Wittke were the others) who in the years immedi­ately
after World War I rescued immigration history from the filio¬
pietists and established it as a legitimate field of historical study.
These were sons of parents who had participated in the great nine­teenth-
century emigration from northern Europe. Second-generation
Americans, raised in immigrant families but trained in seminars at
Harvard and other universities, they were willy-nilly enmeshed in the
clash between differing conceptions of the nature and purpose of
history.1
In response to an exclusionary Anglo-American narrative, immi­grant
historical societies were intent upon defining a virtuous and
patriotic past, one that would gain them esteem and acceptance.2
Along came their sons, the professors, intent on being objective, or,
in Stephenson's words, applying "the historian's standards of dispas­sionate
exposition," dealing evenhandedly with the negative as well
RUDOLPH J. VECOLI is professor of history and director of the Immigration History
Research Center at the University of M i n n e s o t a . H e has written extensively about
A m e r i c a n immigration and ethnic history. His most recent publication is "The Italian
Immigrant Press and the Construction of Social Reality, 1950-1920," in Print Cul­ture
in a Diverse America, edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A . Wiegand
( 1 9 9 8 ) .
as the positive aspects of the ethnic group's history.3
Such conflicts between the professional and the ethnic, between
versions of history (and the resulting tug of loyalties), have been and
continue to be a source of vexation for those of us who are both
scholars and ethnics. This essay explores that relationship through
the career of Stephenson, the immigration historian, whose devotion
to his craft resulted in dissension with, and finally estrangement from,
his Swedish-American community.
George Malcom Stephenson was born 30 December 1883 in
Swedesburg, Iowa, the youngest of ten children of Olaus Steffanson
and Maja Lena Jonsdotter, both of whom had emigrated from Swe­den
at a young age with their families. George's paternal grandfather,
Steffan Steffanson, who had been a crofter in Sodra V i in northeast­ern
Smaland, settled in New Sweden, Iowa, in 1849. In the mid-
1850s, father and mother and seven children died in a cholera epi­demic;
only Olaus and two sisters survived. Olaus farmed successfully
in Swedesburg until he moved to Rock Island in 1894 and became a
merchant.4 George recalled his childhood on the farm with fondness:
"Until I attained the age of ten, I had the good fortune to enjoy the
peace, security and prosperity of Henry County, Iowa." He remem­bered
the Stephenson home as "a sort of clearing house for immi­grants
who came to the community," where newcomers were shel­tered
until they found employment as "hired hands" on the farms of
Yankee neighbors. In Rock Island, the guests were "preachers and
professors," and George remembered listening to conversations about
church problems at the dinner table.5
The only indication that George's boyhood was less than idyllic
was his observation late in life that, thankfully, the Swedish language
was now "cultivated by the few who have the inclination and abil­ity,"
and not inflicted "as an instrument of torture [on] boys who were
compelled to stay indoors to memorize the Catechism, while neigh­bor
boys were playing baseball or coasting, or to attend 'Swede
school' during the summer vacation, when other boys were wading in
the brook or catching fish."6
Since his parents were faithful members of the Augustana Synod
Swedish Lutheran Church, George recalled, "I attended a Swedish
Sunday school, and under compulsion listened to long Swedish ser-
131
mons; and also watched my father nod during the sermon—not in
approval of what the preacher said, however."7
O. Fritiof Ander, perhaps Stephenson's closest confidant, com­mented
that George's pietistic upbringing "left a deep impression
upon him [and his scholarship] from which he never succeeded in
freeing himself."8 Indeed, the seeds of Stephenson's rebelliousness
against an oppressive religious and ethnic environment appear to
have been planted early in his youth.
That George should attend Augustana College was a foregone
conclusion; his father served on the college's board of directors from
1885 until his death. First enrolled in 1901, George was not awarded
the A . B . degree until 1910, because he became involved in a dispute
with the faculty, an early expression of his combative and stubborn
personality.9 Stephenson has left this compelling description of stu­dent
life at Augustana College:
The campus population was s u i generis to Swedish America;
it was recruited from rural and urban communities from the
Atlantic to the Rockies. Farmers, miners, sailors, and com­mon
laborers predominated. These young men burned mid­night
oil over Caesar's G a l l i c W a r and Xenophon's A n a b a s i s in
order to prepare themselves for the high calling of minister­ing
to their fellow countrymen who had migrated to the
"Land of Canaan." Literary societies, debating clubs, oratori­cal
contests, missionary societies, prayer meetings, the Handel
Oratorio Society, the band, and the orchestra took prece­dence
over non-existent dances, bridge parties, fraternities,
week-end parties, and football games. The citizens of Rock
Island spoke disdainfully of the "Swede College," a name
that described it accurately, although the students to a man,
perhaps, resented the characterization.10
After leaving Augustana, Stephenson secured a bachelor's degree
from the University of Chicago and taught several years at the Min­nesota
College in Minneapolis before heading east to study history at
Harvard with Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner had a profound and
lasting influence on Stephenson, as he did upon an entire generation
132
of American historians. In addition to his path-breaking frontier the­sis
of 1893, Turner helped define the new field of social history by
calling for the study of ordinary people and everyday life." Although
Turner encouraged his students, including Marcus Lee Hansen, to
study immigration history, he did not do so in Stephenson's case.
Years later he wrote that Turner "didn't know much about the sub­ject.
I suggested the possibility of writing on the Scandinavians for
my doctoral dissertation, but [Turner] vetoed it because he doubted
there was sufficient material."1 2 Stephenson then wrote a dissertation
which was published as The P o l i t i c a l H i s t o r y of the P u b l i c L a n d s f r om
1 8 4 0 t o 1 8 6 2 : F r o m P r e e m p t i o n to Homestead (1917). Since it was
concerned with the settlement of the West "by pioneers from every
state in the Union and from countries of Europe," the study brought
him back to the topic of immigration.13
Stephenson conceived of his life's work as "writing my own auto­biography
in the form of the history of immigration and of biogra­phies
of Swedish immigrants." The inspiration of his scholarship was
drawn from "the memories of boyhood and youth spent in a Swed­ish-
American community and on the campus of a Swedish-Ameri­can
college . . . [which] took on a new meaning and significance as a
graduate student and as a member of the faculty of one of the largest
Scandinavian universities in the world."14
The latter was a reference to the University of Minnesota, where
Stephenson taught from 1914 until his retirement in 1952 with only
a few brief interruptions. Stephenson's course in American immigra­tion
history was perhaps the first to be offered in any university
curriculum in the country. The nature of the course might be ascer­tained
from his A History of A m e r i c a n I m m i g r a t i o n : 1 8 2 0 - 1 9 2 4 (1926).15
Stephenson noted that the enactment of immigration-restrictive leg­islation
two years earlier "closed a momentous chapter in American
and European history."1 6 A n early and praiseworthy effort at synthe­sis,
the volume was limited by the paucity of research as well as the
biases characteristic of the time. However, Stephenson's injunction to
students of "the causes and motives which underlie the exodus from
Europe to America" to pursue their researches "to the cottages of the
peasants and to the humble dwellings of the laborers in the factory
and on the farm" still guides our studies today.17
133
Contemporaneously at work in his special field, Stephenson pub­lished,
among other articles, "The Background of the Beginnings of
Swedish Immigration," in the A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l Review (1926). But
it was, as he put it, the generosity of the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation and the University of Minnesota that enabled him to
devote a full year (1927-28) to researching the Swedish emigration
in Sweden.1 8 While he luxuriated in the bountiful sources of the
Royal Library in Stockholm, he extended his quest to provincial and
parish archives. Following his own injunction, he visited cousins and
near-cousins "on their farms on the stony soil of Smaland." Stephenson
remembered those "eight or ten calls per day, with at least that many
cups of coffee . . . [as] a delightful exercise in historical research."19
He returned to Minnesota with hundreds of "America letters," grist
for many of his writings, including "When America Was the Land of
Canaan," M i n n e s o t a H i s t o r y (1929), which Stephenson himself re­garded
as "the best thing I have written."20
Perhaps because of his youthful experiences, Stephenson was
drawn to the study of the religious life and institutions of the Swedish
immigrants. A n early work in this vein was The F o u n d i n g o f t h e
A u g u s t a n a S y n o d 1 8 5 0 - 1 8 6 0 (1927). As Ander observed, the rich
holdings of Swedish-American religious literature of the Royal L i ­brary
nourished Stephenson's interests. In fact, he suggests that
Stephenson overlooked other important sources and thus other as­pects
of the Swedish immigrant experience, because he buried him­self
so completely, even compulsively, in this literature.21 The fruit of
this research was to be Stephenson's magnum opus, The R e l i g i o us
Aspects of S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n (1932). It was this work that embroiled
him in a long-running controversy with the conservative clerical
establishment of the Augustana Synod and culminated in his alien­ation
from the Swedish-American community.
Even prior to the appearance of R e l i g i o u s Aspects, Stephenson had
antagonized some of the clergy with his articles. In 1930 he confided
to a correspondent, "Some of the pastors are already after my scalp as
a 'heretic,' but that isn't causing me a single, sleepless night. I prefer
to be the instrument of the liberal and progressive element. . . . I ask
no favors of those self-styled Paul Reveres, who cloak their bad
humors under the guise of a severe orthodoxy."2 2 Stephenson had
134
anticipated a negative response to Religious Aspects; on the eve of its
publication he wrote to John Barnhart:
I have gotten something off my chest. . . . I fear much that
this book will not enhance my popularity with the church
folk in Swedish America. They have been fed on eulogies so
long that they have no appetite for anything else. Well, the
dose I have concocted will not be palatable. You know 1
never did have much time for these professional religious
guys. . . . Blegen read a few pages of my manuscript and
predicts that hell will pop when it falls into the hands of the
clergy.2 3
These anticipations proved to be well founded; one professor at
the Augustana Theological Seminary was reported to have become
"violently nauseated after scanning a few chapters."2 4 The book sold
very poorly; it was apparently boycotted by the more orthodox breth­ren.
Writing in 1945, in reply to a letter praising the work, Stephenson
commented, "You are one of the few Americans of Swedish blood
who has read the book. The Augustana Book Concern wouldn't
even carry it in stock; and the bigwigs in the Augustana Synod have
scarcely deigned to notice it. This was just what I expected, so I was
not in the least disappointed."25
Almost a quarter century following its publication, Stephenson
commented sarcastically upon a letter from an Augustana Theologi­cal
Seminary professor who had written to express appreciation of
R e l i g i o u s Aspects: "It was gratifying to know the historian attached to
the seminary faculty and a handful of brethren in the faith had
discovered the existence of my book—even if it did take twenty-five
years to work the miracle."2 6 Such bitter comments written decades
after the fact belied the high hopes that Stephenson had had for the
book; at the moment of publication, he confessed: "It would please
me if the book would inspire interest on the part of the children and
grandchildren of Swedish immigrants in their heritage, something
that is woefully lacking. It isn't necessary to eulogize the people of
Swedish blood," he added. "The facts speak for themselves."27
As is true of all historians, Stephenson did more than allow the
135
facts to speak for themselves. O. Fritiof Ander judged him "harsh" in
his assessment of the Augustana Synod, adding that Stephenson had
allowed himself to be overpowered by his sources and his "personal
interests."28 He speculated that Stephenson, in his zeal to be thor­oughly
objective, had in fact become overly critical, unable to sepa­rate
his unpleasant memories of a strict Lutheran upbringing from
historical reality. In his preface to the volume, Stephenson admitted
that, "like all historians, [I have] been affected by . . . subconscious
but formative memories."2 9 Although accused by his critics of being
irreligious and an agnostic, those who knew him well described
Stephenson as being "deeply pious."30
Stephenson found a more congenial subject for what was to be
his last major work dealing with Swedish Americans. Written during
the economic depression and New Deal of the 1930s, his biography
of John Lind (1935), first Swedish-born congressman and governor of
Minnesota, struck the theme of progressive politics with which
Stephenson strongly identified. In a letter to Guy Stanton Ford, he
wrote: "You know I am a Wilson Democrat."3 1 In this respect also,
Stephenson radically departed from his background. "In hundreds of
Swedish communities," he observed, "a Democrat was a curiosity, a
strange being, who, if not demented, surely concealed a cloven hoof."32
Stephenson reminisced in 1941:
As a youngster not yet in his teens, brought up in a Swedish
Lutheran home—for Swedish Lutheranism and Republican­ism
were identical twins—I was horrified to hear my Father,
who had stored in his memory the accumulated sins of the
Democratic Party from James Buchanan to Grover Cleve­land,
lament that in remote Minnesota there was a Swede
named John Lind who had not only deserted the Republican
party but had publicly declared himself a "political orphan."
At the time I was probably too naive to comprehend fully
the enormity of Lind's offense, namely, that of running for the
governorship of Minnesota with the indorsement of Popu­lists,
Democrats, and Silver Republicans; but I did detect the
peculiar quality of my Father's voice when he referred to
John Lind as a "Popocrat."33
136
The fact that George's father had denounced Lind as a Popocrat may
have made him more appealing to his future biographer.
The choice of Lind as a subject resonated with Stephenson's
autobiography. Both were reared in repressive childhood environ­ments,
against which they rebelled, becoming religious and political
heretics. Both "dearly loved a scrap and would go out of [their] way
to invite controversy," and both believed that their enemies were
intent on persecuting them for their recalcitrance.3 4 In a letter,
Stephenson wrote that "Lind was an interesting and able man, but
was never appreciated by the Swedes in Minnesota or elsewhere."35
One senses that in this respect as well Stephenson identified with
Lind. Moreover, as James Iverne Dowie, friend and student of
Stephenson, commented, both had "the touch of compassion for
unfortunates in society."36
Stephenson's estrangement from the Swedish-American commu­nity
extended beyond religious and political disagreements; he dis­tanced
himself socially as well. During the 1920s he had been ac­tively
involved with the Swedish Historical Society of America (es­tablished
in 1905), serving as managing editor of its publications
from 1921 to 1929 and contributing many pieces to the Yearbook of
the S w e d i s h H i s t o r i c a l Society of A m e r i c a and the S w e d i s h A m e r i c a n H i s ­t
o r i c a l B u l l e t i n . As late as 1927, he wrote that, although the yearbook
of the historical society was not what it ought to be, "I believe that
there are some signs of improvement from year to year which give
reason to hope that some day it will be a credit to the Society and to
the pioneers and their descendants."37 In a 1929 issue of the B u l l e t i n,
Stephenson cited the Society's financial crisis and appealed to "pros­perous
Swedish Americans . . . for substantial contributions that will
be a credit to the Swedish people."3 8 By the 1930s, however, he had
concluded that "the Swedes are not interested in their history. . . .
The first of this month the Swedish Historical Society staged the
annual banquet, but I didn't attend. . . . So far as I know, the society
is inactive."3 9 In retrospect, Stephenson asserted that the society
"had died because it was strangled at birth. . . . It might have been
saved if there had been one or two men in the organization who
knew what a historical society is supposed to be."4 0 In the most
137
invidious comparison a Swedish American could make, Stephenson
complained that, while the Norwegian American Historical Associa­tion
was supported by wealthy Norwegians, the Swedish society got
checks for two dollars.
Time did not heal these wounds. In a letter of 1941 to Margaret
Anderson, managing editor of C o m m o n G r o u n d , with whom he had a
long and revealing correspondence, Stephenson declared his total
disillusionment with the Swedish-American community: "There are
too many competing institutes and societies, where the well-known
Swedish jealousy gets in its work. I am forever through with the
Swedes in the U S A . I have severed my connection with the Swedish
Society and the Turnblad crowd. Augustana College is the only
creditable institution supported by the Swedes. . . . The other activi­ties
are more or less futile."41
Writing to Adolph Benson in 1944, Stephenson asserted, "I have
been occupied with other things to the extent that I have neglected
in recent years Swedish-American history."4 2 Nils William Olsson
recently recounted that when he consulted Stephenson in the late-
1940s on whether funds should be expended on publishing a journal
on Swedish-American history or on a banquet, "Honest George"
replied: "We tried that and it failed. Enjoy yourselves."43 When Paul
Varg wrote in 1950 to solicit manuscripts for the newly established
S w e d i s h Pioneer Historical Q u a r t e r l y , Stephenson replied that he could
be of no help, since he had completely deserted the field of immigra­tion,
but he added with a querulous note, "I have not seen the first
issue of The S w e d i s h Pioneer. I did not know that any such plans were
afoot. Where is it published? Who is back of it?"44
A reconciliation of sorts took place when Stephenson addressed
the annual meeting of the Swedish Pioneer Historical Society in
Chicago on 7 January 1956. In the lecture, entitled "Rip Van Winkle
in Sweden," he reported on his visit to the Old Country after an
absence of twenty-six years. Stephenson, however, could not resist
this opportunity to even some old scores. He devoted a good deal of
his talk to lambasting the Swedish-American religious establishment,
contrasting the "democracy, pietism, and puritanism of religion in the
United States" with the symbolism, legalism, and clericalism of the
state church in Sweden. The Swedish immigrants, he added, "learned
138
that there was room in the United States for Christians who ques­tioned
the validity of ecclesiastical regulations and legislative enact­ments
which denied the right of a man to teach publicly in the
church and to administer the sacraments, unless he was ordained
according to prescribed forms and ceremonies and set apart in the
clerical estate."45
While the early Swedish-American churches were at their incep­tion
lay missionary movements ("religious experiment stations"), free
of ritualism and liturgical formalism, the Augustana Synod clergy in
time assumed "the artificial sanctity which [had] converted the cleri­cal
estate in Sweden into an instrument of ambition and tyranny."
A n "extraordinary trend toward high-churchism, including gowns,
vestments, and symbolism," followed.46
Stephenson also made pointed remarks, which were certainly not
lost on his audience, about "the hazards and rewards that await the
historian of immigration":
It is not an easy task to ferret out the events of the past; and
it is even more difficult to interpret the facts. Some readers
load on the shoulders of the historian the responsibility for
what has happened. I have long since ceased to take any
responsibility for my ancestors; and I am looking forward to
the time when cheating in history will be as disreputable as
cheating at cards. Leaders of certain immigrant groups have
been extremely sensitive; and some historians have sought to
appease them by distorting facts. In the field of church his­tory
an incredible amount of falsity has accumulated in de­nominational
histories. Some authors have distorted the truth
to the extent that one is tempted to believe with them it is,
"My own church, right or wrong."47
O. Fritiof Ander, who had written his dissertation on the
Augustana church leader T. N . Hasselquist and subsequently a book,
The A m e r i c a n O r i g i n of t h e A u g u s t a n a S y n o d (1942), from a more
positive perspective than Stephenson, perhaps felt himself to be the
target of some of these barbs. This may explain Ander's statement
that Stephenson, "my very close friend . . . could deeply hurt pre-
139
cisely those persons whom he liked."48
Clearly, Stephenson felt unloved and unappreciated by his own
people; there is more than a hint that he thought of himself as "a
prophet without honor in his own country," a phrase that appears
repeatedly in his writings. It is true that he received greater recogni­tion
by Sweden than by Swedish America, being decorated Knight of
the Royal Order of the North Star by the King of Sweden in 1937
and being honored with a Ph.D. h o n o r i s causa by Uppsala University
in 1938.4 9 Stephenson attributed this neglect to the rapidity with
which Swedish immigrants had assimilated. By 1956, he could de­clare
approvingly that the preservation of the Swedish language and
culture in the United States was "a closed chapter."50
If Swedish Americans paid h im little attention, neither did
Stephenson receive the recognition that he thought was his due from
fellow historians. A t a session of the American Historical Association
in December 1938 on "Scandinavian Contributions to American
Life," which was a memorial to Laurence M . Larson and Marcus Lee
Hansen, both of whom had died that year, Stephenson addressed the
needs and opportunities for research in immigration history. Com­menting
on the field as a whole, he noted that "the sum total of
books and articles that have appeared [on the subject] does not give
cause for unrestrained congratulations." Nor had the findings of im­migration
historians "seeped through the covers of textbooks in
American history." Expressing what sounded like personal resent­ment,
he complained that if a historian wrote a ponderous book on
the difference between c o n s i l i u m and c o n c i l i u m in medieval history,
he was sure to have a major review in the A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l R e v i e w,
while if he wrote a monograph on "the greatest V o l k e r w a n d e r u n g in
history," he might get a paragraph in "Notes and Comments."51
In private letters, Stephenson lamented that so few of the "big
shots" of the association had attended the session, since they were
the ones who needed to be informed about the importance and
neglect of immigration history.5 2 Writing to fellow historian Carl
Wittke, he commiserated, "Those of us who have dabbled in the
history of immigration have received little or no recognition from the
historical profession, as you well know; but some day—after you and
I have passed on—historians will probably be grateful for our pio-
140
neering."5 3 By 1948, he could respond to an inquiry regarding immi­gration
history that his research had shifted to other subjects.54 "Years
ago," he added, "I had high hopes for the future of the History of
Immigration. I thought an increasing number of historians would
become interested, but things didn't work out. In recent years a
number of books have been published, but, with few exceptions,
they are of poor quality. Possibly the language problem scares people
away." The following year Stephenson confided to Ander that, since
the subject had grown stale for him, he was "tickled to be relieved of
the teaching of immigration history. Very little of value has been
published in the field since we began our work and some of the most
recent volumes actually stink."55
Stephenson's last book, The P u r i t a n H e r i t a g e (1952), a study in
American religious history, did not deal directly with immigration,
although Ander read it in an autobiographical sense as a "religious
confession."5 6 The work was a vigorous apologia for Puritanism through
which Stephenson expressed his disillusionment with post-World War
II society:
Twentieth-century America appears to have lost the Puritan
heritage. A generation whose "literature" is more akin to the
licentiousness of the press which ridiculed the Puritans in
England, whose "movies" revel in the filth of the muckrake,
whose radio and television programs serve a fare of vulgarity,
and whose mechanism has degraded the superior man and
has enhanced the power of the inferior man, is incapable of
understanding a religious movement whose appeal is to the
"remnant," to those who are conscious of the brevity of hu­man
life and recognize the spiritual life as the one great
reality.5 7
For Stephenson, the Depression and World War II constituted a
"catastrophe that shattered the dream of making a heaven on earth."
Stephenson's progressive vision, which permeated his writings on im­migration
history, had collided with the ugly realities of the twentieth
century.5 8
Stephenson died on 11 October 1958, at age seventy-four. Two
141
years later, at the Eleventh International Congress of Historical Sci­ences
meeting in Stockholm, Frank Thistlethwaite presented a semi­nal
paper, "Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century."5 9 This essay, comparable in its influence to Turner's
frontier thesis, was to be a catalyst, inspiring and informing a whole
generation of migration historians, not only in the United States, but
in other countries as well. The "Sweden and America after 1860"
project at the University of Uppsala was directly stimulated by
Thistlethwaite's provocative reinterpretation of the Atlantic migra­tion.
Under the direction of Sten Carlsson, the project produced
over twenty-five dissertations and other studies of the Swedish emi­gration,
culminating in the volume, edited by Harald Runblom and
Hans Norman, From Sweden to America (1976). Since the death of
Professor Carlsson, the field of Swedish emigration studies has contin­ued
to flourish, thanks to the scholarly work of Runblom and other
alumni of the Uppsala project.60
Similarly, from the 1960s immigration history in the United States
has grown and prospered beyond Stephenson's wildest dreams. The
formation of the Immigration History Society (recently renamed the
Immigration and Ethnic History Society) in 1965 and the founding
of its journal, J o u r n a l of A m e r i c a n E t h n i c H i s t o r y , in 1981 marked the
rapid growth of the field. Most dramatic has been the explosive
production of dissertations, monographs, and articles dealing with
multiple aspects of human migration. Although other factors played
a role, Thistlethwaite's heuristic thesis clearly provided a major impe­tus
to the coming of age of migration history.61
The connection between Stephenson and Thistlethwaite was nei­ther
coincidental nor casual. In the late 1930s, as a Commonwealth
Fund Fellow, a young Frank Thistlethwaite studied at the University
of Minnesota with Stephenson, to whom he later attributed his abid­ing
interest in migration history. A t the international conference " A
Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930," held at the University
of Minnesota in 1986, at which Professor Thistlethwaite was the
keynote speaker, Stephenson's role as a forebear of the gathering was
appropriately acknowledged.62
George Malcolm Stephenson made important contributions to
Swedish-American history and to American history in general. He
142
was in fact slighted by his contemporaries, both Swedish Americans
and fellow historians. Stephenson, however, was buoyed by the belief
that one day his work would receive its proper recognition. To Louis
Adamic, the Slovene immigrant who became an influential writer on
American pluralism, Stephenson wrote in 1939: " A few of us [immi­gration]
historians have cried in the wilderness; orthodox historians
have not heard our cries. Future historians, however, will pay more
attention to what we have written, and, I suppose, that ought to be
consolation and reward enough."63
* A v e r s i o n of this a r t i c l e appeared in Migration och mångfald. Essäer om
kulturkontakt och minoritetsfrågor, D a g B l a n c k and Per Jegebäck
( U p p s a l a : C e n t e r f o r M u l t i e t h n i c Research, 1999).
ENDNOTES
1. Edward N . Saveth, A m e r i c a n Historians and E u r o p e a n Immigrants 1875-
1925 (New York, 1948); Edward Mims, A m e r i c a n History and Immigration
(Bronxville, N.Y., 1950); Rudolph J. Vecoli, "European Americans: From Immi­grants
to Ethnics," in The Reinterpretation of A m e r i c a n History and C u l t u r e , ed.
William H . Cartwright and Richard L. Watson (Washington, D.C., 1973), 81-
112.
2. John J. Appel, Immigrant Historical Societies in The United States, 1880-
1 9 5 0 (New York, 1980); Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Ethnic Historical Societies: From
Filiopiety to Scholarship" (unpublished, 1967).
3. George M. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Min­neapolis,
1932), v. As Robert S. Salisbury points out, although Stephenson
abhorred chauvinistic filiopiety and strove for objectivity, he "was not always
immune to sentimentality when writing about his ancestors." A n assimilationist,
he emphasized the positive qualities of Swedish immigrants and the ease and
rapidity with which they Americanized. "Swedish-American Historiography and
the Question of Americanization," The Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly (April
1983): 121-222. See also George M. Stephenson, "Swedes Leave Their Mark on
U.S. Way of Life," Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 27 June 1948, "Swedish Centen­nial
Issue." Clipping, in George M. Stephenson Papers, University of Minnesota
Archives. Hereafter cited: GMS Papers.
Stephenson was generally an assimilationist, believing that "problems per­taining
to European immigrants have been and are ephemeral, submissive to the
healing processes of time." However, in one of the few references in his writings
to non-European immigrants, he commented, "Our country has more permanent
143
problems of racial minorities: Negroes in the South; Orientals on the Pacific
Coast; Mexicans in the Southwest; and native Indians on reservations . . . no
tailor, barber, schoolteacher, or climate can change the color of the American
Indian, the Mexican Indian, the Oriental and the Negro." Nowhere, to my knowl­edge,
did Stephenson address the consequences of such racial differences for
American democracy. George M. Stephenson, "The History of Immigration"
(manuscript with notation: "December, 1938—at A H A meeting in Chicago"),
GMS Papers.
4. George M . Stephenson, " A n America Letter of 1849," Yearbook Swedish
Historical Society of A m e r i c a 11 (1926): 84-102. The letter written by Stephenson's
grandfather, Steffan Steffanson, is prefaced with a brief family history. See also
Allan Kastrup, The Swedish Heritage in A m e r i c a (St. Paul, 1975), 177. Kermit
Westerberg, then archivist of the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Cen­ter,
provided data drawn from church records regarding the Steffanson family.
For an obituary of George's father, Oliver Stephenson, The Rock Island U n i o n , 17
July 1898, clipping, GMS Papers.
5. "Autobiographical Sketch," 13 April 1941, is the source of these quotes.
Stephenson wrote this for a volume on Minnesota authors, but decided for
reasons unknown not to have it published. George M. Stephenson to Carmen
Richards, 20 June 1945, GMS Papers. George M. Stephenson to G. Bernhard
Anderson, 30 June 1948, GMS Papers.
6. George M . Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle in Sweden," The Swedish Pio¬
neer Historical Quarterly 7 (April 1956): 52.
7. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 59.
8. O. Fritiof Ander, "Immigrationshistoriens Utveckling i Amerika," Särtryck
ur Historisk Tidskrift 1961, 291-92. I am indebted to Victoria Oliver for transla­tions
from this article.
9. Augustana College records provided by Kermit Westerberg. Although he
was to graduate from Augustana in 1904, Stephenson was informed that he was
one credit short (a course on Christianity), whereupon he told the college au­thorities
that he would graduate from a first-class institution, the University of
Chicago. Interview with George M. Stephenson II, 12 April 1991; comment of
Conrad Bergendoff following my presentation of this paper at Augustana Col­lege,
April 1990.
10. "Autobiographical Sketch."
11. George M . Stephenson to Naboth Hedin, 22 January 1938, GMS Pa­pers,
provides a curriculum vitae. Although Turner's perspective on American
history permeated Stephenson's writings, he also explicitly acknowledged this
influence: "[Turner's] tutelage and my own research revealed to me the vital
relationship between the opening of a continent to settlement and the great
exodus from the countries of northern and western Europe." "Autobiographical
144
Sketch." His son recalled that "he was always referring to Turner" as his model.
Interview with George M. Stephenson II. As a progressive historian, Stephenson
also admired the Beards: "The verdict of history is worth playing for—as long as
there are historians like Charles and Mary Beard." James Iverne Dowie, "The
Two Worlds of George Malcolm Stephenson, 1883-1958," 7. This (to my knowl­edge)
unpublished paper, by a student and friend of Stephenson, was provided
by Dag Blanck, Director, Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center.
12. George M . Stephenson to Margaret Anderson, 3 December 1941, GMS
Papers. He commented, perhaps with a touch of pique, "Marcus Hansen prob­ably
got his inspiration to work on immigration from Turner," adding, "Hansen
is much overrated."
13. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 52.
14. "Autobiographical Sketch."
15. George M . Stephenson to Howard K. Beale, 17 November 1948, GMS
Papers. "I believe that my course [History of Immigration] was the first to be
offered at the collegiate level—that is, in a department of history.... My little
book, A History of A m e r i c a n Immigration . . . will suggest the contents of the
course. . . . I would be very sorry, however, if you got the impression that my
course was as limited as my book, which was a pioneer effort intended to be
merely an introduction."
16. George M. Stephenson, A History of A m e r i c a n Immigration: 1820-1924
(Boston, 1926), 3.
17. Stephenson, History of American Immigration, 7.
18. George M . Stephenson to G . N . Swan, 11 April 1927, GMS Papers. He
added, "My aim is to write a history of the Swedish immigration, but when I
ponder the vast amount of research that must precede this undertaking, I am
doubtful if it can be done within the present generation."
19. "Autobiographical Sketch." Stephenson elsewhere described this re­search
as a "form of cousin-hunting in the red cottages along the rocky, pine-clad
hills of Sweden." Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 27 June 1948, "Swedish Centen­nial
Issue." Clipping, GMS Papers.
20. George M . Stephenson to Louis Adamic, 14 June 1939, GMS Papers.
21. Ander, 291-92. In the Royal Library, "Stephenson found a paradise [of
documentation] for those interests which were rooted in his youth."
22. George M . Stephenson to "Dear Duffy," 24 December 1930, GMS Pa­pers.
Of his articles in the Lutheran C o m p a n i o n attacking the Augustana Synod
leadership, Stephenson wrote, "[They] are so brutally frank and truthful that
they will not enhance my popularity in the synod, if I have any left." As a
member of the board of directors of Augustana College, he also was a severe
critic of the conservative clerical establishment. Stephenson conveyed the fla­vor
of this conflict in a letter to Ander: "The board . . . is alive to the necessity
145
of inaugurating a new regime, although it may take a little time before some of
us Bolsheviks on the board will be satisfied." 27 February 1931.
23. George M . Stephenson to John D. Barnhart, 25 March 1931, GMS
Papers. The reference is to Theodore Blegen, friend, colleague, and pioneer
historian of the Norwegian immigration to the United States.
24. George M. Stephenson to Clifford Nelson, 14 September 1956, GMS
Papers.
25. George M . Stephenson to G . Bernhard Anderson, GMS Papers.
26. George M . Stephenson to Clifford Nelson, 14 September 1956, GMS
Papers.
27. George M . Stephenson to E. Hamlin, 10 June 1932, GMS Papers.
28. Ander, 291-92. Ander continued, "Stephenson strove to be objective
and to overcome his own prejudices. While he distanced himself from the
Augustana Synod, it proved to be impossible for him to separate his personal
impressions from historical reality. His deep religious interest sharpened his cri­tique."
29. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration, v. But, he added,
he had "clung as best he could to the historian's standard of dispassionate expo­sition."
In a letter, Stephenson wrote, "I do not flatter myself that I have always
succeeded in attaining impartiality and objectivity. But I have at least made an
honest effort." The book, he noted, had not been well received by "certain
individuals in the Augustana Synod, of which I am a member.... Possibly there
is still truth in the scriptural passage about a prophet without honor in his own
country." George M . Stephenson to E. Hamlin, 10 June 1932, GMS Papers.
30. Stephenson was subject to slanders that he was not a member of the
Lutheran Church, that he did not send his children to Sunday school, and even
that he was a heretic. O. Fritiof Ander to George M . Stephenson, 9 March 1931;
George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 27 March 1931, GMS Papers. Conrad
Bergendoff, a friend and himself an historian of the Augustana Synod, remem­bered
Stephenson as "deeply pious." Comment. Also interview with George M .
Stephenson II, 12 April 1991; and Dowie, 11,15. Dowie observed: "Because he
eschewed religious orthodoxy to the point of finally disassociating himself from
the church of his childhood, Stephenson was sometimes charged with holding
irreligious, not to say agnostic, views." But he confirms "the deep piety of
Stephenson."
31. George M. Stephenson to Guy Stanton Ford, 21 December 1956. Quoted
in Dowie, 13.
32. George M . Stephenson to S. G. Reinertsen, 26 January 1939. George M .
Stephenson, John Lind of Minnesota (Minneapolis, 1935), 119.
33. "Autobiographical Sketch," 1.
34. Ander, 292; Stephenson made this observation about Lind, but it could
146
equally have applied to him. John L i n d , 122.
35. George M . Stephenson to G . Bernhard Anderson, 30 June 1945, GMS
Papers. Ander comments: "They both had the same type of childhood environ­ment,
from which they later removed themselves for psychological reasons. They
became heretics in religious and political respects, and believed they must suffer
for this." 292. Dowie also comments upon the parallels in the lives of Lind and
Stephenson, 13-14.
36. Dowie, 14. Dowie noted that "Honest John" and "Honest George" were
both sympathetic to the temperance movement, and that Stephenson "reserved
some of his sharpest barbs for Swedish clergymen who sought their inspiration
more frequently from the jug than from the Holy Spirit."
37. George M . Stephenson to G . N . Swan, 11 April 1927, GMS Papers. To
S. W. Geiser, Stephenson wrote, "Almost every number of the Yearbook of the
Swedish Historical Society of A m e r i c a and the Swedish-American Historical Bulletin
since 1921 has something from my pen." 13 June 1930, GMS Papers.
38. Swedish A m e r i c a n Historical Bulletin 2 (February 1929).
39. George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 12 December 1934, GMS
Papers.
40. George M . Stephenson to Margaret Anderson, 3 December 1941, GMS
Papers. "It was killed," he asserted, "by jealousy and incompetence and inertia."
Byron Nordstrom, however, in his study of the Swedish Historical Society of
American, concluded that Stephenson himself, by his emphasis on objective
scholarship, contributed to its demise. Author's notes on a lecture by Nordstrom.
41. Stephenson to Anderson, 3 December 1941, GMS Papers. The refer­ence
to the "Turnblad crowd" alludes to the American Swedish Institute in
Minneapolis, which catered to upper-class Swedish Americans. Swan J. Turnblad
was a wealthy newspaper publisher who donated a magnificent mansion and his
fortune to the Institute.
42. George M . Stephenson to Adolph Benson, 23 October 1944, GMS
Papers.
43. Comment of Nils William Olsson following my presentation of this
paper at Augustana College, April 1990.
44. George M. Stephenson to Paul Varg, 17 September 1950, GMS Papers.
45. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 55.
46. Ibid., 56-58.
47. Ibid., 60.
48. Ander, 292.
49. Who Was Who in A m e r i c a , Vol. 3,1951-1962, 817. While the honorary
degree from Uppsala and the decoration from the King of Sweden are men­tioned
in this entry, Stephenson's LL.D. from Augustana College is not.
50. Stephenson, "Rip Van Winkle," 60.
147
51. Stephenson, "The History of Immigration," 3, 6. GMS Papers. A n ab­breviated
version was published in Minnesota Chats (a University of Minnesota
publication for the fathers and mothers of its students), 21 (17 January 1939), 4.
Stephenson also commented that "the history of immigration is as yet an illegiti­mate
field, just as the musicians tell us that the saxophone is an illegitimate
instrument."
52. George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 26 January 1939, GMS
Papers. Responding to S. G. Reinertsen's complaint (he was superintendent of
the Moorhead Public Schools) that immigration was neglected in grade and
high school history courses, Stephenson replied, "It does seem strange that a
movement of population that brought over thirty million Europeans to the
United States has been almost totally ignored in textbooks." George M .
Stephenson to S. G . Reinertsen, 26 January 1939, GMS Papers.
53. George M . Stephenson to Carl Wittke, 1 November 1939, GMS Pa­pers.
54. George M. Stephenson to Howard K. Beale, 17 November 1948, GMS
Papers.
55. George M . Stephenson to O. Fritiof Ander, 10 February 1949, GMS
Papers. Although Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted was not published until 1951,
Stephenson expressed his opinion of the book in a letter to Margaret Anderson:
"Wasn't the Pulitzer Prize for Handlin's The Uprooted God-awful? Ford asked me
to review the book, but I refused on the ground that the author didn't know
anything about the subject." 31 May 1952, GMS Papers. Guy Stanton Ford was
a professor of history, president of the University of Minnesota, and editor of the
A m e r i c a n Historical Review; from 1941 to 1953.
56. Ander, 92.
57. George M . Stephenson, The Puritan Heritage (New York, 1952), 267-69.
58. James Iverne Dowie, who had the opportunity to observe this transfor­mation,
wrote: "By the 1940s students sitting in Stephenson's classes became
cognizant of the collapse of the great dream. Their teacher, unacquainted with
the current fad among scholars who talk glibly about the great alienation in
American society, slipped neatly into the role of a Jeremiah." Dowie, 22.
59. Reprinted in Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne Sinke, eds., A Century of
E u r o p e a n Migrations, 1830-1930 (Urbana and Chicago: 1991), 17-49. The es­says
in the volume attest to the pervasive and widespread influence of the
Thistlethwaite thesis.
60. For a review of Swedish scholarship on international migration, see
Harald Runblom, "United States History in Swedish Research and Teaching," in
G u i d e to the Study of United States History outside the U . S . , 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 8 0 , ed. Lewis
Hanke (White Plains, N.Y., 1985), vol. III, 397-406. The report acknowledges
the influence of Thistlethwaite's essay upon the Uppsala project. See also Salisbury,
148
122-34.
61. Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Introduction," Century of E u r o p e a n Migrations, 1-
14; idem, "From The Uprooted to The Transplanted: The Writing of American
Immigration History, 1951-1989," in From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism, ed.
Valeria G. Lerda (Rome, 1991), 25-53.
62. Frank Thistlethwaite, "Postscript," in Vecoli and Sinke, A Century of
E u r o p e a n Migrations, 51. Of his studies at Minnesota, he told the conferees: "I
was attracted especially by the teaching of George Stephenson. ... This modest,
friendly and important scholar, more than anyone else, set my compass for me."
In a letter to the author, 5 August 1994, Thistlethwaite recalled: "[Stephenson's]
lectures were of the greatest interest and relevance to me in my novel Minnesota
context. [He was] a kindly, mild mannered man with a moustache, at the time
rather unusual."
63. George M . Stephenson to Louis Adamic, 14 June 1939, GMS Papers.
149